15. Chapter 15
Milo
“You have never driven a car?” Evie’s tone lands somewhere between a flatline and a funeral.
She’s staring at me from the passenger seat, her injured ankle propped against the glove compartment. Her green eyes are wide.
“Correct.” I wrap my hands around the steering wheel. The manuals explained hand placement very clearly, so I’m cautiously optimistic. “But I’ve done extensive research.”
She thunks her head against the headrest hard enough to rock the whole seat. “We’re going to die.”
“We are not going to die.”
“Milo.”
“The physics are very straightforward. Gas makes it go. Brakes make it stop. The steering wheel points it where you want.”
“Oh my God.”
“Look,” I say, shifting toward her, “I could handle this. Get you home, fix the ankle. Quick, easy, painless.”
Her head rolls sideways on the headrest. “You’re joking, right?”
“I’m not.” I scratch the back of my neck. “But healing a sprained ankle in exchange for your immortal soul is a pretty rubbish deal.”
Evie groans. “I don’t . . . I’m still processing, Milo.
I can’t decide if I believe you or if I’ve had some kind of stress-induced psychotic break and it’s all a hallucination.
” She stares at the empty parking lot. “I’m going to call Daisy.
Or my mom. Someone who has a driver’s license and doesn’t claim to be a denizen of the underworld. ”
Her hand moves toward the cupholder where her phone sits. I need her to see that I’m not useless, that keeping me around has a point beyond being cosmically tethered to her whether she likes it or not.
“Wait.” My hand hovers near her wrist. “Give me a second.”
“To do what?”
I stay quiet. Contract demons learn early that power sells better without explanation. You never list possibilities. You pick a tiny, ordinary problem and make it vanish so cleanly the mortal has to wonder what else you could fix.
The engine kicks on in the quiet lot, and Evie flinches. Her hand jerks back from the phone as dashboard lights bloom green and blue, and the fuel gauge needle swings to half-full. With a mechanical click, the gearshift slides from park to reverse. The car begins to roll backward.
Evie grabs the dashboard with both hands. Her knuckles go pale against the dark vinyl.
“What—” Her pitch climbs a full octave. “What is happening right now?”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s fine?” She whips toward me. “The car is driving itself, Milo!”
“Technically, I’m doing it.”
“You’re not touching anything!”
“I know.”
The car reverses out of the parking space in a clean, precise arc that I’m honestly a little proud of, then shifts into drive and pulls forward. The steering wheel turns on its own, guiding us toward the lot exit.
“Stop.” Evie grabs my arm, her fingers digging hard into my skin.
“We’re barely moving.” I halt the car at the edge of the lot, the blinker ticking patiently.
Her breath comes fast, chest rising and falling too quickly beneath her cardigan.
The collar of it has slipped sideways, baring the curve of her collarbone, and I force my attention back to the windshield.
“This is not fine, this is not okay, none of this is remotely normal. I need you to understand that from my perspective. The car is possessed—”
“Evie!”
“How are you doing that?”
“Temptation.” I keep my tone as steady as I can, which is harder than it should be with her hand still clamped around my forearm.
“That’s what demons do. We don’t cast spells.
We influence and persuade. Show people how simple things could be if they said yes.
” I shrug. “This is a sales pitch, Evie. The car already knows how to run; I’m just removing the obstacles between it and where you need to go. ”
She finally releases my arm. The pressure of her grip lingers after her hand drops to her lap.
“This is real.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re actually . . .” She swallows. “A demon.”
“I am.”
She lets out a long, shaky laugh. “Okay. Fine. Drive me home.”
“You want me to . . .” I gesture vaguely at the steering wheel.
“Drive the car with your creepy demon persuasion? Yes, Milo. Before I change my mind about all of this.” She puts her hand up. “But slowly. And if anything even remotely feels wrong, I’m opening this door and rolling out. Bad ankle and all.”
“Noted.”
I ease the power back into the car. We merge onto the street at a speed that could charitably be called cautious and more accurately described as glacial. Evie keeps giving me directions: left here, right at the stop sign, stay on this road past the library.
“This is so weird,” she murmurs.
“Which part?”
“All of it.” She tucks the escaped strand of hair behind her ear. “Does it cost you? Using your . . . whatever this is?”
The question surprises me. Most humans don’t ask that.
“A little energy.” I leave out the part where using too much makes my mortal form unstable.
Holding this shape takes power, and when that power runs thin, the demon underneath starts winning.
But she doesn’t need to know that right now.
“Think of it like . . . flexing a muscle. I can hold it for a while, but eventually it gets tiring.”
“So you’re flexing right now?”
“Constantly.” I wink at her. “Impressed?”
Her mouth curves, a hint of a dimple appearing. “I’ll let you know.”
We pass under a canopy of maples, and the shadows dapple the hood in shifting lace patterns.
“All of this really fascinate you?”
“What does?”
“This.” She gestures at the windshield. The street, the town, the maples shedding their first yellow leaves onto the asphalt. “Normal stuff.”
“None of this is ordinary.” I watch the road, guiding the car around a gentle curve. “You live on a planet that grows food out of dirt and turns water into clouds. A giant ball of fire keeps you warm from millions of miles away, and you treat that like background noise when it’s extraordinary.”
Her answer is a small, non-committal hum.
“Were you any good?” I ask, desperate to hear her voice again.
“At what?”
“Driving when you first started.”
She snorts. “I was horrible. Kept clipping the curb on turns. Mixed up the gas and brake in the first five minutes and almost launched us across the parking lot. My mom sat there going you’re doing great, sweetie with both feet braced against the floor.”
“Did you want to quit?”
“After I nearly took out a mailbox, yeah.” She shifts, her knee drawing an inch closer to the center console. “But Daisy told me if I gave up she’d bring it up at every holiday, birthday, and family dinner for the rest of our lives. So I didn’t.”
“Daisy sounds like an effective motivator.”
“That’s her in a nutshell.” She’s studying me now instead of the road. Her gaze moves from my hands on the wheel to my face with an expression I can’t fully decode.
“What?”
“You.” She shakes her head slightly, a small smile playing on her lips. “You look like you’re having your sixteen-year-old learning to drive moment right now.”
“Is that bad?”
“No.” Her smile widens, and it transforms her entire face. “It’s actually really cute.”
The word lands squarely in my chest. The car drifts left before I catch it, my concentration fracturing for a split second.
“Cute,” I repeat.
“Don’t make it weird.”
“I’m not.” I clear my throat. “In Hell, that’s an insult. In fact, a pretty devastating one. They use it right before they reassign you to latrine maintenance.”
“Hell has latrines?”
“That’s what you took from that?” I glance at her incredulously.
“You brought up demon bathrooms. I have follow-up questions.”
“The point is, where I come from, being called cute means you’re a joke, not someone worth taking seriously.
” Her curiosity is both endearing and dangerous.
The more she wants to know, the more I’ll tell her, and the more I tell her, the harder it becomes to maintain any kind of professional distance.
Her silence stretches until I assume I’ve made it weird, despite her explicit instructions not to.
“Well, you’re not in Hell,” she says, softer than before. “Here it’s a compliment.”
Brindlewood scrolls past the windows. Mailboxes with little red flags, picket fences in need of fresh paint, and somebody’s sprinkler arcing silver over a green lawn.
“Can I ask you something?” Evie says after a while.
“Anything.”
“Why did you refuse it?” She’s running her thumb along the seatbelt strap. “When I offered my soul, you said no.”
“Because you didn’t understand what you were offering.” I keep my eyes on the road. “Taking your soul under those conditions . . . Hell wouldn’t have cared. The contract would’ve been valid, but it would’ve been wrong.”
“Wrong by whose standards?”
“Mine. Which are apparently the only ones that don’t matter.”
“And if I had believed you? If I’d known exactly what you were and offered anyway?”
“I need a contract, Evie. That’s why I’m here. Every rational calculation says I should be trying harder to convince you.”
“So why aren’t you?”
“I’d want it to be fair.” But there’s another honest answer, and it’s louder. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“That’s a nice thing to say.” Her voice is careful. “But how do I know you’re not just saying that to get me to trust you?”
“Because I can’t lie.”
I realize too late what I’ve just admitted. Father’s voice echoes in my head, lecturing about revealing weaknesses to potential contracts, about maintaining advantage, about never giving mortals information they could use against you.
“What?”
“I shouldn’t have said that.” Heat crawls up my neck. “But it’s true—demons can’t lie. We bend the truth, twist wording, imply things that aren’t accurate. Most of us are excellent at it.”
“And you?”
“I’m . . . not most demons.” The understatement of my entire existence. “I’m terrible at it. I say too much or the wrong things.”
“So everything you said . . .”
“All true. Couldn’t be anything else, even if I wanted it to be.”
When I steal a look, she’s biting her lip.
“What?”
“Nothing.” The laugh spills out of her. “You’re just very bad at this.”
“It’s not funny.”